


Destroyer of Worlds

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Daisy Johnson is a bamf, Gen, Major character death - Freeform, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 19:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13106724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: “We can’t change the future,” he reminded her. “We couldn’t then and we can’t now. But they did get one thing wrong.”The real story of how and why Daisy Johnson broke apart the Earth.





	Destroyer of Worlds

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the end of the S5 premiere, I decided to write a spec fic (ish) on why Daisy would destroy the world.
> 
> also suits AOS Advent 2017 prompts ["hope"](https://aosadvent2017.tumblr.com/post/168665464483/banner-by-the-beautiful-merryfitzsimmons-8#notes) and ["angel"](https://aosadvent2017.tumblr.com/post/168738650236/banner-by-the-amazing-merryfitzsimmons-6#notes)

In the end, Daisy thought, she should have seen it coming. 

She’d felt it for a while, somewhere deep inside herself. 

The knowledge that she would bury her friends.

  

For a while they managed to stick together as the world collapsed into chaos around them. They clung to each other, looked after each other so well it almost felt like they were the last real people left on Earth. But of course, there was only so much that seven people could do against an alien dictatorship and soon enough, things started to spiral beyond their control.

 

Coulson was the first to go, in a fiery, guns-blazing, one-against-the-world sacrifice to buy time while Daisy and Elena escaped, and rescued a mob of Inhumans from the Kree cells.

 

A little while after that, Jemma’s mysterious immunity to one of the Kree’s favourite pathogens attracted the wrong sort of attention from their leaders. She was captured and – after flatly refusing to cooperate, whether willingly or under duress - experimented on, before finally being released. Delirious with her newly regained freedom, she had sprinted full-tilt for that shadowy corner of the world that the team now called home, until she’d realised - and stumbled and fallen and ploughed into the dirt with the shock of it – that the only reason they would have let her go was because they’d won. She’d contracted something. Something dangerous. Something that could wipe out the resistance.

So she’d run the opposite direction instead, and died alone.

  

May lasted a little longer than that. She was getting old by the time she went. Her eyes clouded with cataracts and she walked with a permanent limp, her legs and knees having been destroyed and re-knitted so many times. She remained a key strategist in their little band of resistance until the end, and died in as much peace as anyone could afford these days, surrounded by most of the remaining people that loved her. 

It was funny, Daisy mused, the way that people used ‘funny’ for things that were not funny at all – like how she was sure that May would have preferred Coulson’s end, and he hers. 

Still, the rest of them soldiered on.

  

And then there was Fitz. 

His was a slow death, and one of the hardest as the dwindling resistance lost perhaps its truest believer. It started with a painful arthritis - in his hands at first, which was cruel enough, and then it spread to his shoulders, his back, his knees. Still, he refused to stop working; building panel after panel, machine after machine, engines and life support systems and generators and UV light-towers for growing food, and all manner of things that Daisy and even Mack did not fully recognise or understand. As per the policy they’d developed in case of capture, nobody had a clear idea of what all this was supposed to mean, not even the people working on it, until the day Fitz died. 

That day, Daisy was curled up in a chair by his bedside as he slept, trying to resist the urge to chew on the sleeve of her jacket. She had asked not to be disturbed, feeling much less the hardy resistance leader their followers knew, and much more the lost girl about to watch one of her best friends disappear before her very eyes. 

Fitz mumbled something, incoherent, and Daisy threw herself forward, falling to her knees at his bedside. He smiled – amused, apparently, by her dramatics, as if he wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing. 

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “’s just what happens when you breathe in metal dust all day, ‘n don’t eat anything, and-“ 

He cut himself off, his words lost in a barrage of coughing, and Daisy poured him a glass of water. She couldn’t tell if her hands were shaking or if it was the water in the glass itself, but she got it to him eventually and the coughing calmed. She helped rearrange his pillow so that he could sit up, but Fitz batted her away, too tired for the effort. Almost too tired to keep his eyes open. His whole body ached, even as he smiled ruefully over at Daisy.

“Not long now,” he said, his voice croaking with an age he hadn’t lived yet. 

She clutched his hand fiercely. “Mack – just wait for Mack. He’s coming in from scouting. He’ll be here soon.” 

“That’ll be nice.” 

His body shook – once, violently - as if it was about to launch into another coughing fit, but was too tired to manage it. The end was coming faster than he thought it would, and though it hurt to push her away, he had to claw past Daisy to pull open a nearby drawer. He pushed a notebook into her hands. Frowning in confusion, she pulled out more papers from the drawer. On one of them was an illustration of a massive space station. Daisy’s jaw slackened. 

“This is what you’ve been building?” 

“The Lighthouse,” Fitz confirmed. “That’s what it was called, right?” 

“Yeah. The one in – the one in space, after I…” Daisy frowned, piecing things together slowly. “Wait. You don’t think –“

“It’s big enough for several thousand people. Mack’s been helping me make shuttles, too. We’ve been sending bits and pieces into space. It’s nearly ready.”

“Ready? For what? I don’t understand.” 

“Yes, you do,” Fitz pointed out. He reached out again and Daisy gave him her hand. His squeeze was not as strong as it once had been, and his skin felt papery and odd, but it was still his hand. It still felt warm. With horror, she thought about how this might be the last time she’d ever feel that warmth. But Fitz needed to tell her something, so Daisy looked into his eyes, and saw in them why he had been such a believer. The wonder and the inevitability of the universe. 

“We _can’t change_ the future,” he reminded her, his voice soft but steady, and full of conviction. “We couldn’t then and we can’t now. We bought ourselves a little time, with a lot of lives, and here we are. But they did get one thing wrong.” 

He smiled.

“You’re Daisy Johnson, and you’re going to save us all.”

 

Those words echoed in Daisy’s mind for hours. Days. They were a lot to live up to – as were the eyes of the gathering crowd, who had fled here from, as far as Daisy could tell, all over the world. Some of them still managed to have such hope that it almost broke her heart at the same time as filling it. Most of them, though, looked to her: the last hope, for humanity and Inhumanity alike. 

“Don’t let me fail them,” she whispered. She was not sure to whom. Mack, standing a few feet away, directing refugees about their final missions on Earth? The ghost of Fitz or Jemma or Coulson or May, who she longed to guide her through this? Maybe herself. That’s all she had left, really. 

 _Not long now._  

The ground seemed to beat beneath her, as if it could feel the anticipation thrumming through her veins. The crowd buzzed, scared and hopeful, curious and heartbroken. The prospect of spending the next few days in tiny shuttles in the unknown vacuum of space was not an inviting one, but it was better than the alternative: the Kree were turning more and more Inhumans – there were even rumours of mind and blood control – and those pockets of resistance that had made it this far were being snuffed out one by one. As far as Daisy had managed to discover – and as Fitz had probably already known – this was the last one. 

Before her sat the last shuttle of the 10-stage interstellar evacuation mission to save humanity. 

The _SS Hope,_ Fitz had called it. 

That’s why they’d decided to launch it last: in case it pulled a Challenger and blasted itself out of the sky. Nothing killed a revolution like Hope literally going down in flames. 

Fortunately - as could always be expected of Fitz and Mack’s work – the other shuttles had all taken off harmlessly and were well on their way up to the Lighthouse. The last of the remaining civilians were walking up the gangplank of the _Hope_ when Elena appeared at Daisy’s side. 

Daisy clenched her fist.

“They’re here,” Elena reported.

She’d seen this coming too. Felt it, in the vibrations on the ground: armies, marching. This being their last chance – life or death - they’d be coming after the dregs of the resistance with everything they had. 

“We’re ready,” Mack announced, marching down from the gangplank with a determined expression. “Everyone’s strapped in, ready to go.” 

“Yeah, but we’ve got company,” Daisy informed him grimly. He frowned, at her, then at Elena, who he knew had been out scouting before. The shotgun axe came down from his back, and he cocked it. 

“Where?” 

Elena nodded her head in the direction they would have to go, and Mack nodded with determination. To Daisy, he said –

“Get that bird off the ground,”

\- and with that he was gone, following Elena to face the firing lines. Two of them against an army would never last long, but for them this had always been where it was going to end. Humanity’s last line of defence. Death so that others may live. Not the worst way to go, all things considered. 

 

Which brings us back to Daisy.

It was with a heaviness in her heart that she signalled for the last pilot to take off. She received his solemn final salute with a stiff upper lip and turned her attention to the task ahead. It was all up to her now and these precious, last few seconds were where she would make her final stand. They were oh-so-close now, and she knew what she had to do.

Daisy lifted her head, proud, feeling the heat on her face and the rush of the air from the engines of the last shuttle lifting off. She reached out after it, feeling its vibrations in the air; feeling her blood sing with the frequency that would get humanity to freedom. A smile touched her lips as she farewelled the ship – after all, maybe she couldn’t literally change the future, but who would have thought that one day she, a scrappy orphan raised in a van, would become this? 

Kneeling slowly, Daisy put her outstretched hand on the precious earth. She dug her fingers into its surface and reached down into it with her mind, feeling the frequencies of rock and magma and shifting plates. She reached further than she ever had before, pushing through the nosebleed and the headache, downward and outward until she could hear the running river; the grass crushed underfoot; the kickback of pistols and the falling of bodies in battle not far away. She felt – with a violence she had not expected; so powerful it was as if she could see it – Mack’s body crash to the ground as the immense odds finally overwhelmed him. She was hardly aware of her own self, her own heart breaking, the tears on her own face, with her consciousness spread so wide across the world, but she knew it hurt. And when she felt the hummingbird heartbeat that was Elena die it was if strings were being cut inside her. 

Maybe they were. 

The last strings holding Daisy to this world were gone. Overwhelmed with the pain and Elena’s scream when Mack was cut down and the dissonant screaming of the earth she screamed too and the world shifted. Rocks cracked and split, magma trembled and fissures broke open – not just at her feet but all across the country. Kree ships were blasted out of the sky. Cracks opened in the earth that swallowed trees and buildings. Her body hummed with all the frequencies of a dying world and Daisy watched herself be lifted into the air, pulling all the threads together into a reluctant, tumultuous harmony. She hit a note, somewhere in there, and all of a sudden it didn’t hurt. It felt like diving into a pool of water; slow and smooth, and she could watch the world collapse around her in slow motion, untouched. 

Drifting above the apocalypse, Daisy remembered that once the Asgardian, Sif, had claimed she would be transformed into a Kree weapon; a drone, marching at their beck and call – or worse, a believer in their empire. The Kree themselves had been pretty excited about that too. And Deke, and the others on the Lighthouse fifty-odd years from now, had believed it too, or some version of it anyway. That she’d destroyed their world. Only she knew… she, and the ones who had come before her… that it was not so simple. 

She was Quake. Destroyer of Worlds. 

Yet, even as the tectonic plates of the Earth cracked and burst by her will, like a glass still in the motion of breaking, she had crushed that name into the dust. There was hardly anything left to destroy. Only enough for one hell of a scorched-earth campaign as the _Hope_ escaped the atmosphere, sailing humanity onto their next sanctuary – and their next challenge.

Those few Kree who had somehow managed to cross the burning, exploding Earth approached Daisy. They looked small, and greedy, and far too confident for the likes of her. Could they not see what she had become?

She was Daisy Johnson. Saviour of Humanity. 

And like an opera singer breaking a glass, she waited until the perfect moment to let go the note she’d been holding onto. The harmony shattered, and all the discord of this dying world unleashed at once. It ripped through her fragile human-esque body, and through the Kree, and through the Earth, and the whole planet finally splintered around them. 

Daisy died with a bloody, victorious smile upon her face.


End file.
